We’re just wrapping up a few last posts from last week’s World Congress of Herpetology in Vancouver. In a tour de force, Laura Rubio-Rocha presented two posters, side-by-side, in the first night’s session. We’ve already discussed her doctoral work on geographic variation in adaptation to different climates in A. carolinensis; here I briefly mention her poster on a high elevation Colombian anole that exhibits year-round reproduction in an environment in which there are two rainy seasons. This interesting study was recently published; you can learn more about it in our previous post on that paper.
Category: New Research Page 48 of 66
A sampling of the anoles examined by Emma Sherratt
The World Congress called on Emma Sherratt to serve as the closer, presenting the last talk on the last day of the meeting. The choice proved brilliant, as she sent the audience off to the banquet in high spirits with a captivating report on her examination of 30+ specimens of amber-encased anoles. Emma has already wowed us with the images and videos she produces by micro-CT scanning; needless to say, the audience was amazed. Preliminary analyses suggest that multiple species are present in the sample (only one amber anole has been described in the scientific literature), and several of the types may match present-day ecomorphs. Her abstract:
Travis Ingram reported on a new method he devised to test whether the anole radiations on the Greater Antilles are more similar than might be expected to occur by chance. We all know that each island has experienced its own radiation, producing more or less the same set of ecomorphs. However, some islands have more ecomorphs than others (Jamaica: 4; Cuba, Hispaniola: 6). In addition, there are non-ecomorph species on the larger islands. It is always possible that it is just a coincidence that the same types have evolved on multiple islands. After all, given large enough evolutionary radiations, one would expect the same morphology to evolve by chance on multiple islands. Travis developed a method to test this hypothesis, and found that, indeed, the Greater Antillean radiations are more similar in morphology than would be expected by random evolutionary change. Read all about it in the abstract:
Sebastian Lotzkat presented a fascinating talk on geographic variation, both morphological and genetic, in Panamanian reptiles, emphasizing the highlands of western Panama. Although he discussed a wide range of species, he spent an appropriately large amount of time focusing on anoles, which if I recall correctly, he termed his favorites. To cut to the chase, he’s found very large amounts of variation in almost every species examined, including in some cases dividing species into several new species. Some of this work has already been chronicled in AA, and another paper will soon be reported on, but apparently there is a lot more yet to come. Read the abstract below the fold.
Anole brains. For scale, the partial coin is an American penny.
A pair of talks from Duke University took different approaches to examining anole smarts. Recently minted Ph.D. Brian Powell reported on his examination of the brain size and composition of different anole species. Brian reasoned that anoles living in different habitats would evolve differences in brain structure corresponding to the different challenges they faced, and thus that species that use the same habitat should have converged on brain morphology. However, results failed to support this hypothesis and instead indicated that the size of different brain components evolves in concert. More details below.
The three species that have demonstrated behavioral flexibility in the lab. Sure wish I could remember what the third point was
Later in the meeting, Manuel Leal reported on the cognitive flexibility of several anole species. Previous work has shown that A. evermanni is not only adept at solving novel problems, but can reverse previously learned patterns so as to ignore the stimulus that previously was rewarded and instead respond to a stimulus that previously hadn’t been rewarded. Leal has now extended that work to show that two other anoles can do the same. He then went on to test how adept anoles are at telling apart two similar patterns. He found, surprisingly, that they could tell very different patterns apart, but did not seem to be able to distinguish more similar patterns. Leal concluded by wondering whether minor differences in signals are detectable by receivers, which is an underlying assumption of many studies of sexual selection and communication. Manuel’s abstract is below the fold as well, although he went off-script in much of the talk he presented.
A male Anolis cristatellus dewlaps on a tree in Miami, Florida. Picture reproduced with permission from Kolbe et al. (2012).
Anoles are remarkably adaptable creatures. You can find anoles in hostile environments, such as the tops of mountains in the Dominican Republic, in near-desert environments, and in places with over-winter freezing. Anoles are also a model system for rapid evolution; in response to strong selective pressure, an equally strong evolutionary response occurs within a few generations. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that anoles are also one of the most invasive reptiles in the World. Although they are endemic to the tropical and subtropical regions of the New World, today anoles can also be found in such remote places as Guam, Hawaii, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.
One of the major questions surrounding anole invasions is how the organisms will respond to the challenges of a new environment. When anoles invade new environments they inevitably encounter new thermal and hydric conditions – how do these anoles adapt to a different environment? Jason Kolbe has spent many years exploring the ecology and genetics of Anolis invasions, and has focused especially on invasions in Florida (1, 2, 3). The Puerto Rican trunk-ground, A. cristatellus, has been found in Key Biscayne and South Miami since the mid-1970s. Ambient temperature is important for A. cristatellus and other anoles have been documented to acclimate to low temperatures. In this study Jason Kolbe and colleagues addressed two questions: (1) To what extent does the thermal environment change from Puerto Rico to Florida? and (2) Is there a phenotypic response in tolerance to cold?
Laura Rubio-Rocha, a masters student at UT Knoxville, presented an anole double-header at Saturday evening’s poster session. In one poster, Laura presented work on thermal physiology of two anole species that occur in the United States: the native green anole (A. carolinensis) and the introduced brown anole (A. sagrei). By sampling each species from a number of localities across a latitudinal transect extending from southern Florida to southern Georgia, Laura was able to test whether populations or species vary in their ability to tolerate cold temperatures. To evaluate each species’ ability to tolerate cold temperatures, she used a simple behavioral assay that diagnosed the lower critical thermal minimum (CTmin) as the temperature at which a species no longer responded to physical stimuli. Although anoles readily recover from this state in captivity, anoles in field aren’t likely to last long when incapacitated.
When CTMin was assessed in the field, Laura found that thermal tolerance largely mirrored the latitude of sampled populations. Within each species, those that occurred further north were better able to cope with lower temperatures than population sampled further south. A strong difference between the two species, with green anoles (A. carolinensis) being able to tolerate much colder temperatures than brown anoles (A. sagrei). The story, however, doesn’t end here.
Recognizing that some degree of variation in a given individual’s cold tolerance might result from acclimation and plasticity, Laura conducted her analyses both in the field immediately after capture and after allowing the animals to acclimate to the conditions of a common garden laboratory environment for several months. When Laura analyzed her laboratory data, she found that the strong difference in cold tolerance between species persisted, but the differences within populations of each species from localities across a latitudinal gradient were no longer evident. Her results suggest that some degree of cold tolerance is genetically determined, but that variation within species along a latitudinal gradient is likely a plastic response.
A terrible photograph of Blair Hedges’ presentation (sorry, I was stuck in the back of the room).
Blair Hedges used his talk at WCH7 to present his exciting new results with Caribbean skinks. You can read more about this work in the paper he published in Zootaxa earlier this year with Caitlin Conn (pdf link from Hedges webpage) and in Jonathan’s previous AA post on this paper. Using analyses of a dataset that includes four genes (three mitochondrial and one nuclear) from 136 individuals representing 14 of 16 genera, Hedges and Conn report discovery of dozens of previously unrecognized species and advocate recognition of 16 genera of skinks across the new world. Unfortunately, many of the new species identified by Hedges and Conn seem to already be extinct, and Hedges showed some very compelling data to support the hypothesis that the decline of skink populations was a response to the arrival of the mongoose.
Sondra Vega reported the results of a fascinating study of diet in nine Puerto Rican anoles. Using isotope analysis from tail tissue, she concluded that all species are to some degree omnivorous, not terribly surprising in some sense because a number of species have already been reported to eat fruits and berries. What is surprising is that there seem to be two discrete groups, suggesting that some species are more omnivorous than others. In particular, some are more carnivorous (cooki, monensis, pulchellus, and stratulus) and others more omnivorous (cristatellus, cuvieri, evermanni, gundlachi and krugi).
Luke Mahler reported the amazing news (truth in advertising: I’m a co-author) that a large and very distinctive new anole has been discovered in the Dominican Republic. Here’s the abstract:
Discovery of a short-limbed giant Anolis from Hispaniola supports a deterministic model of island evolution and community assembly
We report the discovery of a species of giant anole from Hispaniola that provides new evidence for determinism in the evolution and assembly of Caribbean island Anolis faunas. The new species is most closely related to Hispaniolan ―crown-giant‖ ecomorph anoles (Anolis ricordii clade). However, it is ecomorphologically most similar to Cuban giant twig anoles of the Chamaeleolis clade: both are very large anoles with short limbs and a short tail that tend to utilize relatively narrow perches in cluttered habitats this discovery adds a new dimension to the phenomenon of among-island ecomorph matching that characterizes Greater Antillean anole faunas. In addition, phylogenetic comparative analyses suggest that key aspects of the similarity of Hispaniolan and Cuban giant twig anoles may be the product of evolutionary convergence. Being restricted to a narrow band of threatened mid-elevation forest near the border of the Dominican Republic and Haiti, this new species should be considered critically endangered.